Rust's Garry Newman responds to Riftlight announcement backlash: "the more things we're working on the better"

I think it's safe to assume that for every action, there is at least one person on the internet angry about it. For instance, I ate a cheese, ham and pickle sandwich for lunch, and can only imagine that my decision has already sent someone into an incandescent fury. Luckily, what I didn't do was announce a new game. Facepunch Studios did , and the Rust developer is now faced with a backlash. The reason? Early Access survival game Rust isn't yet finished.

"Are we crazy?" asks Facepunch's Garry Newman , who is about to drop some analogies up ins. "Are we doing it wrong? Should every person in the company be working on the same thing? Should HBO make one TV show at a time? Should Warner Brothers make one movie at a time?"

The point, as you can probably tell, is that work on Riftlight won't affect the development of Rust. In fact, it's one of a number of games being developed by the company. "Assuming [internet commenters] read the full post and got all the information and are still angry... they are probably going to be even angrier to find out that we have three other prototypes being worked on by Facepunch staff."

"Our strategy at the moment is to hire talented people to make the games they want to play," Newman writes. "We're not asking you to fund this. We're not starting a kickstarter and begging you for money – we're funding it.

"We are spending money Rust and Garry's Mod make to do this. Arguing that we should be re-investing that money back into only those games is like telling apple they can't spend the money they made from iPhone and Macs to fund the development of the iPad. Keep in mind that we spent money Garry's Mod made to develop Rust – and that turned out pretty good, right? Or should Helk and Pat have been working on Garry's Mod all that time?"

Newman points to the @RustUpdates Twitter account as a sign of the work that's still being done on the game, and also states his belief that "funding" a game is different to buying into Early Access. "We funded Rust for 1-2 years before it eventually became what it is. You bought early access to it. When you buy a pizza you aren't funding Dominos, you're just buying a pizza. It's true that the sales of Rust have been insane and we have stepped up development to suit, and I think you only have to compare the experimental version to the live version to see that."

Finally, Newman confirms that all the people who work on Rust are still working on Rust—not the studio's other prototypes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil has been PC gaming since the '90s, when RPGs had dice rolls and open world adventures were weird and French. Now he's the deputy editor of PC Gamer; commissioning features, filling magazine pages, and knowing where the apostrophe goes in '90s. He plays Scout in TF2, and isn't even ashamed.